


The Weight Of Success

by CourierNinetyTwo



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-10
Updated: 2012-11-10
Packaged: 2017-11-18 08:46:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/559076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CourierNinetyTwo/pseuds/CourierNinetyTwo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Omega is a living thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Weight Of Success

**Author's Note:**

> Set immediately after Mass Effect: Invasion.

Aria has never believed in the goddess, but she knows that Omega has an altar. Her own people call the station the _heart of evil_ , but it’s her heart too. It has been for over three hundred years. At 0400 after a riot has cleared the streets, she can hear Omega breathing, the shift of metal and heat, recycled oxygen straining through rusted vents. Like any living thing, it needed blood.

She sacrificed entire centuries of her life in its name. Countless mercenary groups, slavers, drug dealers, and even innocents fell to the slaughter. The floors didn’t care about the color of the blood they drank; blue and red washed away just the same. When it didn’t devour her sleep, it ate at her dreams, whispering about the feral masses that plotted to overthrow her. Everything had a price. Her throne was built on death – assassinations and overdoses, suicides and accidents – there was no such thing as natural causes on Omega. She was always staving off her growing age; staving off the dark. How long would it be before her biotics faltered instead of grew, before there was nothing left of her mind to sharpen and hone?

The first time she met Commander Shepard – in person, not as an extranet clip or a stasis pod drawing a hundred kinds of trouble to her docking bay – was when she realized resurrection wasn’t out of the question. She heard her rivals, both in and outside the Terminus Systems, dismissing the notion that Shepard had really been dead, but T’Soni had been looking for a miracle, not a hideout. When the plague cleared, when Archangel became a ghost, she added to the tally. All Aria could ask herself when the Normandy took off past her apartment window was – what was the universe’s price for bringing someone back to life?

When the Bahak system became a void, she had her answer. Three hundred thousand dead confirmed, thousands more suspected. The price wasn’t lifted for heroes, but she wondered if it was Omega’s fault. Maybe if Shepard had never been brought to the station, had never returned like a prodigal daughter, the commander would have died quietly somewhere or seen her homeworld prosper again. It seemed no one else had considered the irony of bringing a Spectre back to life.

Then the station took Liselle. It wasn’t fair. Whether the avatar was Paul Grayson or Kai Leng, under the aegis of the Illusive Man, Omega had exacted its toll again. Refugees from batarian worlds filled every port, making overcrowded districts full to bursting. Fires and riots followed and she waded into the crowds, banishing the weak beneath her own two hands. Their corpses fed the engine that kept her empire turning.

When Cerberus finally came in force, after they captured her and made her see the abominations they were creating in the name of humanity, Omega honored her sacrifice. Every gang and mercenary outfit abandoned their colors to rise to the station’s defense, fighting the finest guerrilla war she’d seen in a thousand years. They won from within. It was outside, with a fleet of the Illusive Man’s ships surrounding Omega like a gauntlet, that she was forced to concede. Aria had surrendered everything to the station except her life, but she would not give that up yet.

_Blood in, blood out._

As the transport carried her to the nearest relay, Omega shrinking in the distance, Aria remembered. However many more had to be killed, its will would be done. And when the galaxy turned its eye on her station again, Cerberus would be bled dry.


End file.
